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New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

201–210 of 254 posts

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people have a bit of a popular misconception about the Explorer advertising thing. What's happening is that MS is adding a banner to Explorer advertising paid OneDrive subscriptions. I totally agree that it's massively inappropriate, but I do think that most people are imagining third-party advertising which is not what's happening - a lot of people might not consider the current situation to be an "ad" neces…

I don't particular care who is trying to sell me shit in the file manager, I care that shit is being sold in the file manager . In an operating system I paid $100 for. Unacceptable.

The shit being sold in the file manager is... space in the cloud for your files. Which is managed by the file manager.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#202
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the downvotes! But seriously, do you honestly think that Microsoft is spying on your more than Google, Facebook, or Amazon? And do you think your Mac OS doesn't have the exact same sort of telemetry (or more!) that Windows has? The 90's are over.

> But seriously, do you honestly think that Microsoft is spying on your more than Google, Facebook, or Amazon? Yes. I have much more control* over what google and facebook can spy on. MS as the platform owner has the ability to spy on everything. *Except for on android, fuck google now in particular.

Sure, I can accept that a platform can be doing more than a website and also that you have less control over a platform. Good points, both.

I won't comment on Android. I already got ripped to shreds above by trying to bring up the point that mobile is completely locked into two major players that act exactly like Windows 10.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#203
post #151

If anyone trusts microsoft right now after the past year or two worth of things we've learned I highly doubt their dedication to a free and open source vision of the future. I actually have a hard time beleiving some of these comments are even organic... (web and server devs are going to migrate to windows!). What world do these people live in? It's like people live in fantasy land and have forgotten the 90's truth o…

I don't trust Microsoft. But they're less evil than Apple, look at Apple is doing with its locked garden (no GPL, only one browser engine allowed, no JITing except for their Javascript engine, development only on their platform, etc., etc.). On top of this, Microsoft is a smaller fish these days. They've lost mobile, probably forever. They're behind in search, ads, cloud, etc. So they're, maybe not toothless, but def…

> I don't trust Microsoft. But they're less evil than Apple, look at Apple is doing with its locked garden (no GPL, only one browser engine allowed, no JITing except for their Javascript engine, development only on their platform, etc., etc.).

Hate to break it to you, but the Microsoft Store has the same limitations regarding browser engines as Apple's iOS App Store.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting this is the real end-goal of WSL. MacBooks were once expensive, but high-quality, grab-and-go unixy development machines. Now, they're mostly just expensive. When WSL matures, any commodity laptop will be a cheap, decent quality, grab-and-go unixy dev machine. It'll probably be easier and more reliable than installing Ubuntu directly! At that point, web and server devs will migrate en mass from Mac to Win…

You can already target Linux directly from Visual Studio using either WSL or a Linux machine as the target. It uses the compiler on the Linux machine. Details here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/04/11/linux-dev... And, of course, VS offers Android and iOS targeting in both C++ and .NET. The C++ info is here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/04/18/android-a...

These are still too new and have random problems associated with them:

No partial compilation if you target Linux. Everything has to be sshed over every time and compiled from scratch.

If you have a linker error,it's not displayed right away, you have to dig through files. These are painful to resolve.

Lots of other problems too, not the least of if you need high performance disk access, you can forget about WSL.

Don't get me started on debugging through rgdb + vs.

After our evaluation, we simply got Linux machines and VMs (under Windows) for development.

WSL and remote Linux for VS are a great idea, but it looks like they need few patch rounds to be Enterprise ready.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#205
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to repair and upgrade my computer. I suspect there are many people like me that would like the option to upgrade components on my laptop as well. I used to be able to do that with a MBP (2012-ish), now I can't... The WSL is compelling and to be honest, one of the main reasons I switched to OSX was the command line. Now, I can have a command line and not have to run VM's for 3d stuff, games, and more. Pretty co…

That's a personal desire. The context here was corporate buying and depreciation. Why would a corporation want to repair its computers, any more than it would want to repair e.g. its office furniture?

Because swapping a burned out power supply is 5min job while waiting for a [company] technician to bring that replacement computer can be a day+ several others to get the original back?

It boils down to how much the downtime costs. "Do it all in the Cloud" simply doesn't apply across the board.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#206
post #160
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since its 'bash on Windows' something modern and bash-ish would be lovely.

... Perhaps the icon should correlated directly with the distro that you're running?

I had a feeling this was the direction you were going in based on the ASCII logos in the screenshot. For the major distros this should work well, but a generic icon would still be handy for the smaller ones (assuming they can be used at all).

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm saying this now; POSIX will never be a first class citizen on windows - we might get shims in /proc and /dev, but windows will never run from POSIX. as long as Win32 exists (and lets face it, that's not going away for a long time), we're basically stuck with running a docker container with linux on it in windows. and that might be all you need. but for many *nix people, this is no where near enough.

Why would you want this, when the NT kernel is so much better architected than any extant Unix except for perhaps Solaris?

POSIX is a standard.

Windows has yet to provide a consistent way how to obtain the OS version across releases. Then we can maybe talk about standardizing apps communications.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already target Linux directly from Visual Studio using either WSL or a Linux machine as the target. It uses the compiler on the Linux machine. Details here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/04/11/linux-dev... And, of course, VS offers Android and iOS targeting in both C++ and .NET. The C++ info is here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2017/04/18/android-a...

These are still too new and have random problems associated with them: No partial compilation if you target Linux. Everything has to be sshed over every time and compiled from scratch. If you have a linker error,it's not displayed right away, you have to dig through files. These are painful to resolve. Lots of other problems too, not the least of if you need high performance disk access, you can forget about WSL. Don…

Great feedback, thank you! Linux targeting isn't my area, but I know the guy who owns it would love to chat with you. If you want to help us make this better, would you mind sending me an email at apardoe @ youknowthecompany.com? I totally understand if it's not worth your time. But thank you regardless!

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#209
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you run things like nano & stop and navigate around with arrow keys?

As long as you start ConEmu with "-run {bash}", everything works very well, yes.

Thanks, I had trouble with arrow keys working when I tried it a while back but I'll give it another go with the "-run {bash}" option. And the Mac autocorrected "htop" to stop.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#210
I still find it funny that people claim that they code on a Mac because it's flavor of Unix is somehow close to Linux. There's an ocean of differences between the two and I'm getting tired of people who perpetuate the false sense of security that because they're coding on macOS that they'll be fine when they deploy to a Linux environment. WSL is starting to look like the better option for those who for whatever reason can't develop for Linux in a Linux environment.
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